An extremist, not a fanatic

September 19, 2017

Corbyn's success: centrists' failure

For months the Times has been running a series of columns on how centrists are befuddled by Corbynism. Nick Cohen improves upon those pieces.

His piece contains a big truth – that Corbyn “won the left-behind middle class.” Not only are Labour members disproportionately professionals, but also Corbyn’s Labour polled well among the AB social group.

This happened in large part because, as Rick said, the middle-class isn’t as posh as it used to be. Younger professionals especially have become proletarianized. They have high debt, no hope of buying a house and stressful and oppressive working conditions.

In this context, calling Corbynistas middle class is to look at class the wrong way – as a social gradient rather than a property relation. A lot of Corbyn’s support derives from the propertyless – those who are the victims of capitalist stagnation and oppression and not its beneficiaries. As Nick says, it comes from people "unable to meet the basic middle-class membership requirement: the ability to buy a home."

This poses the question: if Corbyn is as deplorable as Nick thinks, why are so many decent intelligent people supporting him so enthusiastically?

It’s not because they are fucking fools. It’s because centrists contributed to the economic trends which have given us cheesed-off professionals, and those people are embracing Corbyn as an alternative to the policies that have failed them so badly. Centrism did so in several ways:

- New Labour’s endorsement of managerialism has created a proletarianized professional cadre who lack autonomy at work – and this managerialism might also have contributed to the stagnation in productivity that has given us a decade of flat real wages. (To his credit, Nick has attacked this trend; he just hasn’t connected it to the popularity of Corbyn).

- In acquiescing in the increased income, wealth and power of the 1%, centrists tolerated inequality between the ultra-rich and “middle class” sorts in the 10th-20th percentiles. As Tim says, this bred a resentment among the latter. (Personally, I think the resentment justified, but that’s by-the-by).

- Centrists have offered little solution to the unaffordability of housing, which has given us a propertyless “middle class”.

- The Lib Dems’ acquiescence in austerity, and the Labour right’s failed attempt to triangulate it, meant that centrists are associated with the squeeze on living standards, especially in the public sector. They are, of course, also responsible for high student debt.

Moralizing about Corbyn misses the point – that his support has definite economic roots in stagnation; the pulling away of the 1% (or 0.1%) from other professionals; the rise of immaterial labour; unaffordable house prices; and degradation of erstwhile good jobs. It also misses the point that centrists contributed to these trends, or at least acquiesced in them. Support for Corbyn is a reaction against all this.

Worse still, attacks upon Corbyn distract liberal centre-leftists from what should be their biggest job – of redefining centrism to make it appeal again. It’s difficult to sell capitalism to people who have no capital and little hope of getting it. Until centrists grasp this fact and correct the errors that led us to this mess, Corbyn might well remain popular, for all his faults.

Update: on re-reading Nick's piece, I realize I was too harsh on him, and have tweaked this accordingly.

Indeed. Redefining requires centrists to recognise how transparently biased their moralizing has been; and just how much they need the other side of the story to be heard (and respected not pitied). What we really want is for our institutions to be able to generate and maintain enough support so as to enable our economy to develop responsibly with requisite care for all. So currently: more power to your elbow JC.
Media outlets arguing JC supporters are a deluded pack inviting a '70s throwback to instigate totalitarianism is, to say the least, unsurprising...

It’s difficult to sell capitalism to people who have no capital and little hope of getting it.

I don't understand this. Capitalism has always been sold to people with no realistic hope of becoming capitalists. Unless you are referring to home ownership. But owning your home doesn't make you a capitalist.

I think it's something different. The story capitalism is good for workers is now harder to swallow.

Luis Enrique is not totally wrong, but in England I think lots of working class people did buy the idea that owning your home made you a Capitalist. Hence right to buy. Some have actually become slum landlords this way so have become dependent on unearned income created by selling off state assets on the cheap. The reality of increasing inequality follows from these kinds of policy and their long term effects.

Do Corbyn supporters really believe he will make them better off?
If so then they are fools!
And aren't we always being told that we should emulate Germany?
What have wages done there?
What are home ownership levels there?
Where is Germany's Corbyn?!

The figures emphatically do not say that "Labour members [are] disproportionately professionals" - that element of Cohen's article is a distortion of the data. Labour members may be disproportionately ABC1, but ABC1 covers an awful lot of ground; C1 covers all non-manual jobs lower than 'intermediate', i.e. everyone who's not a manager and whose working life puts them behind a desk. As you might expect from observable changes in working patterns, the ABC1 population share has been growing steadily and currently stands at 54%; perhaps the Labour membership is just ahead of the curve. Also worth noticing is this pagehttps://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2016/feb/26/uk-more-middle-class-than-working-class-2000-data
(from which I took the 54% figure), which comments
"the largest electoral bloc in Britain are C1s. The Conservatives beat Labour among this grouping by some 15 points in both 2010 and 2015, suggesting that any future Labour success would probably need to close this particular gap."

A 'disproportionate' focus on disempowered clerical workers might be just what Labour needs. The Conservative lead among C1s in 2017 was 4%.